About

About FAIMS

The Fisheries and Aquaculture Information Management System is a free platform for the public institutions that survey and manage fisheries around Africa's great lakes and the western Indian Ocean.

Background

Why FAIMS exists

Fisheries and aquaculture feed and employ millions of people around Africa's great lakes and coast. Managing them well needs reliable figures on catch, effort, fleets, prices and farms, collected the same way every month and available when decisions are made.

FAIMS grew out of eCAS, an earlier catch assessment system, and became a full platform in 2023. Today it covers catch assessment and frame surveys, biological research, aquaculture, and apps for fishers and traders.

One system instead of many files

Surveys that lived in different offices, files and formats now sit in one system with one set of definitions.
Records arrive as they are collected

Records arrive from the field as they are collected, so dashboards and reports follow the season, not the year after.
Published survey methods

Catch estimates follow FAO and LVFO survey methods, and every record is checked before it counts.
Apps for fishers and traders

Fishers and traders use eFisher and PFZ for weather, fishing zones and markets, and share their own records.

Where it runs

Where FAIMS is used

FAIMS holds catch and frame survey data from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda on Lake Victoria; Burundi, DR Congo, Tanzania and Zambia on Lake Tanganyika; Uganda on Lake Albert; Tanzania on Mtera Dam and the Mara River; and the Indian Ocean coast of mainland Tanzania, Zanzibar and Rodrigues in Mauritius.

Each country runs its own surveys with its own staff and sees only its own data. Lake-wide figures for Lake Victoria or Lake Tanganyika are built by adding up the national ones, as in the regional reports.

The people who build FAIMS are on the team page. The terms for using it are on the licensing page.

Partners